The Long Lost Non-Existent Journals of Jeffery A. South, Esq.

 Last June, I opened up a brand new Moleskine journal I had bought for myself on vacation and wrote this:

Approximately five months later, I wrote this in that same Moleskine journal:

One of my true regrets in my life is not having kept a regular journal. Oh, I have volumes of notebooks filled with scribbles but those are mostly devoted to story ideas and lists. Much of the space in those notebooks is devoted to rough drafts of scenes for a novel or script in drafting. There is value in that, of course, but it isn't what I would call true journaling. I've read several articles and blog posts about the benefits of journaling. Some common themes in those readings include better mental and emotional health, reduced overthinking and brooding, expanding creative thought, and developing a mindset of gratitude. 

I'm terrible at that kind of journaling. The worst. I've tried but always get bogged down in my own desire to be brilliant. Whenever I sit down to write anything - an email, a text, a story, a social media post - the need to always bring my A game takes over. This blog post is intended to be an honest self-reflection of my aversion to authentic diary keeping. It only need be an honest expression of that. Yet, with each sentence I type, I'm obsessing over making it funnier, pithier, more meaningful. That is very performative thinking. The intention isn't to express myself. I'm just trying to be clever. 

This is a by-product of my teenage years. I knew then writing was a passion. Novels, plays, and film scripts were an obsession. Anytime I sat down to write something, I sought to emulate the writers I enjoyed during that era: Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, James Thurber, Douglas Adams. Every journal entry had to reflect that style instead of just a way to process my thoughts and emotions. It was as if I was unintentionally keeping my emotions at arm's length. Humor has always been my coping mechanism but that has sometimes come at the expense of honest introspection. 

Another regret about my poor journaling: no true chronicle of my personal history. I do have some journal entries that speak to some difficult times but I wish I had kept a log of my life. How interesting would it be to read journal entries from my first week of high school in 1981? What was on my mind in April of 1984? Probably a girl, sure, but what was impacting me? What were my dreams and desires? My fears? I can recall most of that but memory is tricky. Revisiting the writings of 16-year-old me trying to work through first love and heartache, friendships, hobbies, and deep thoughts would be such a treat for me. Alas, no such writings exist because I didn't want to go there. The old blog I kept was sometimes where I curated memories of growing up in the mid-70s to mid-80s. Again, I usually approached those from the standpoint of humor but it would've been nice to have original journal entries to inform some of those pieces.

I would love to tell you that the result of this post will be a more fertile and robust journaling habit. The truth is I likely will just try to do the best I can and see what happens. There is a process I've latched onto called Morning Pages. I learned about Morning Pages through writer Julia Cameron. At its essence, this process is intended to allow writers to get the clutter out of their brain through stream-of-consciousness journaling. No censoring. No editing. No trying to be anything other than authentic. Get the stuff out. I have done this on occasion and can attest to its effectiveness. 

So much has happened since the start of 2020 and trying to process it all on top of all the usual noise going on inside my brain is overwhelming. Usually, I find myself in some kind of fugue state, crushed under the weight of it all. When I do make an attempt to write about it, I don't even know where to start. Then, that nagging ache to be clever and pithy creeps in and nothing gets accomplished. 

I'm not sure what else to say about this. It occurs to me in this moment that everything I've done in this blog post is what I should do in my journal. Just get it all out until there's nothing left to write. This is good. This is productive. Healthy. I feel better. Still...